Minimum wage, maximum effort

If you work a minimum wage job in Washington state, you’d need to work about 81 hours a week to pay the average monthly rent in this state. It’s worse in California, where one reportedly has to work 129 hours a week to pay the landlord. This morsel of news comes to us courtesy of a blog post by the AFL-CIO today that’s making the rounds on social media. The post actually cites a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (see image below).

After the initial shock of this news set in, I started wondering if that 81 hours a week holds true for all Washingtonians or if the Puget Sound region and its higher cost-of-living drives up the median gross rent for the state.

Generally, one wants to keep their housing costs to less than 1/3 of their total income. To pull this off earning minimum wage in Clark County, you’d need to work about 73 hours a week (Formula: $912 x 3 divided by $9.32/hour, then divided by 4 weeks). That’s not quite the 81-hour-week that the NLIHC arrived at in its calculations but it’s still far more than any rational human being would want to work in a week.

In King County, the median gross rent is about $1,109. Using the same math above, one would need to make 89 hours a week at minimum wage to pay your rent with the recommended one-third of your monthly income.

It could be worse, though. According to the study, someone earning minimum wage in Hawaii would have to work 177 hours a week to afford “fair market housing” and not pay more than 30% of their income for housing.

There are 168 hours in a week.

John Hill

John is the web editor at The Columbian, where he has worked since 1995 in various roles. A journalist for the past 25 years, he's a fan of good storytelling, data, graphics and still likes to read an actual newspaper. Twitter: @hilljohng